


Дело no.17

by neversaydie



Series: Like Real People [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Brainwashing, Depression, Fate & Destiny, Genderqueer Bucky, Identity Issues, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Past Abuse, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-War, Self-Hatred, Therapy, World War II, in which fate is a metaphor for mental illness somehow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-01
Updated: 2015-12-01
Packaged: 2018-05-04 10:01:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5329994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neversaydie/pseuds/neversaydie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Winter Soldier was born long before Bucky Barnes died. </p><p>That's the part Steve can never know. </p><p>"It wasn't all HYDRA."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Дело no.17

**Author's Note:**

> Дело no.17 = Case no.17, it's on the Winter Soldier file Natasha gives to Steve at the end of CATWS. There are probably a million stories with a similar title but well.

The Winter Soldier was born long before Bucky Barnes died.

That's the part Steve can never know.

"It wasn't all HYDRA."

The confession comes out more strongly than Bucky had expected it to, sitting on his therapist's too-soft couch and resting his hands on his knees in a way that looks deceptively relaxed. The room is blandly decorated and always slightly too warm when he comes for his appointments, which he's gratefully sure is deliberate. He doesn't make eye contact with the doctor, already feeling exposed without his usual curtain of hair to hide behind.

He's trying new things again, and he's not sure if he regrets it or not yet. Bucky had asked Steve to cut his hair this time, had informed him with the clipped syllables of a mission briefing of the adverse reaction he'd had last time and what to look out for. Then he'd handed him the scissors and sat on the edge of the bathtub with a towel around his shoulders, and things had slid into place like they'd never –

 

_hot garbage-smelling air drifting through the window open to the street and all its noise, downstairs' same old songs playing on the wireless just heard under the steady snick of scissors behind his ear, bony fingers that could be Steve's or Sarah's bending his ear so there's no nick when –_

"I mean, it was mostly HYDRA. Credit where it's due for the whole torture and brainwashing thing."

The doctor doesn't react when he's unnecessarily flippant about what had happened to him, and Bucky figures she's probably used to it by now. It's one of his 'defence mechanisms' (or maybe 'coping skills' or 'attempts at deflection' or whatever the fuck fancy language he's supposed to dress it up in this week), being blasé or shockingly nonchalant about the abuse he's been through. It's supposed to make people stop asking questions, she says, but Bucky's not sure how much he buys into that crap.

He's doing better now, if he wants people to stop asking questions then he just asks them to. Politely. Mostly.

 

_"Shut the fuck up."_

_"_ Bucky _." Steve gets the same tone of voice his mom used to when they'd take the Lord's name in vain, thinking she couldn't hear them on the other side of the apartment. Bucky near enough snarls at his friend, barely able to catch himself as the plates on his mechanical hand shift with a threatening whirr._

_"Sorry." He grits out, turning back to Clint, the words a struggle as he finds himself caught between the urge to drop to his knees and beg forgiveness for misbehaving and the urge to start destroying and not stop until things are quiet and he's alone. "I… don't want to talk about that."_

_"I kinda got that from 'shut the fuck up'." Clint snorts, easy tone not doing a thing to mask the defensive posture he'd dropped into as soon as Bucky so much as sounded violent. He thinks they get complacent sometimes, forget that he's a weapon since he paints his nails and wears fluffy sweaters now. It's almost viciously satisfying to remind them that's he's a legitimate threat. "My bad."_

_"It's okay." His body doesn't relax all the way, and that comforts Bucky about as much as it offends Steve. "Forget about it."_

_Somebody might as well._

"So what parts do you think weren't down to HYDRA?" Dr Khan is Bucky's favourite therapist, to the point where he actually goes to her appointments without being guilt-tripped by Steve's puppy eyes that have been fucking him over since he was ten years old. She reminds him of Peggy, kind of, and that's enough take-no-shit attitude for him to feel less like he's doing a really shitty impression of a human being around her.

"My unit got captured in Austria. It's in the books, happened in '43." He doesn't elaborate, doesn't feel the need to tell her shit she probably already learned in history class as a kid. "I got pneumonia, couldn't work in the factory like the rest of the POWs, so they took me for… testing. Apparently they were trying to make a serum like the one Steve got. I didn't know that at the time."

Reciting facts or events is easy, he can do that until the cows come home. It's talking about how he feels that makes Bucky stall, rub his flesh hand uncomfortably over his week-old stubble and look out of the bullet-proof window for something to do with his brain. He has trouble identifying feelings these days, let alone actually putting them into words and shoving them out of his mouth.

"I'm case seventeen." He settles on, after such a long pause that he'd started to focus too hard on the loud ticking of the wall clock and nearly hypnotised himself. He drops his hands to twist his fingers in his lap, picking at the already-peeling nail polish that probably suggests more about his mental state than he'd like. "Sixteen guys died before me. I was the first one who survived the experiments."

"Does that make you feel guilty?" Dr Khan probes, making a note of the confession that Bucky's sure will be circulated around his extensive 'treatment team', as if that doesn't make him feel like his thoughts don't belong to him all over again. "That you survived when they didn't?"

"No. I don't feel guilty about it." She looks surprised by how quickly he answers, and Bucky's not sure if that makes him feel better or worse. "It… It makes me think there was something wrong with me to start with. Before the experiments. I dunno if it was the war or just me, but…"

"How do you mean, something wrong with you?" It's clearly not the answer she'd been expecting, and Bucky almost feels bad about not being able to serve up some good, old-fashioned Catholic guilt and let Dr Khan continue with the treatment path she's been gently leading him down so far.

"I mean… Look, I got drafted. I didn't sign up for the army and I sure as hell wasn't interested in doing more than I had to. I wasn't yellow or anything, I just wanted to do my service and get out. And then as soon as I picked up a rifle things started to change. All of a sudden I was getting fast-tracked, promoted, extra training. I was a _natural_."

The word tastes bitter to his back teeth, and for the first time to date Bucky reaches out with his metal hand (the steadier one, his medications make his flesh hand shake sometimes even when he's not nervous) and picks up the glass of water on the table in front of him to take a sip. Even if the liquid is drugged, it'll probably make this conversation a lot easier. He doesn't like to think about how he's a –

 

_fucking natural look at that, he could probably take a shot while he's bent over and make it I swear to god this is ridiculous no wonder he's scheduled out for the brass every time we take him out in the field Jesus Christ it's like he was born to_

 

"Bucky." Dr Khan breaks in quietly, and Bucky blinks a couple of times before he realises he's just sitting there holding the glass of water, hairline cracks spreading up the sides from where he's gripped it just a little too hard.

"I… I was a natural." Bucky sets the glass down slowly, as if anything he does now will change the fact that it's broken beyond repair. "And then they trained me as a sniper. And then I was weak and sick and I should've died, but I didn't. There was something inside me that made me survive the injections and the shocks, and I…"

He swallows hard, the threat of bile still lingering at the back of his throat. This happens sometimes, when he says something that would probably go against his old operating protocols if they were still in use. They're not active anymore, but there's enough of their teeth and claws left in him to make him feel nauseous if he does something he's supposed to be punished for.

Natasha told him it never goes away, not completely. That's almost a comfort, in a strange way. Bucky's lost so much of himself already that the idea of something being indelible is weirdly attractive, even if that something is horrifying. Even a scar is something to keep.

"It was easier to kill people than it should have been, even in the beginning. They were just targets, I got told they were bad and I didn't ask questions because I was a solider, it wasn't my job to decide who got killed. It was just my job to kill them." The skin at the sides of his fingernails is bleeding, he realises blankly from somewhere far back in his head. Steve will worry. "I was already… I was good material for them to work with. If they'd picked someone like Steve then it would've never worked. But I already had something… wrong."

"I don't think there was anything wrong with you, Bucky." Dr Khan's voice is calm, neutral, but Bucky can tell she's thrown by the crap pouring out of his mouth when he's been so eager to stay silent and not give himself away in so many of their previous sessions. "You were a very young man put into a horrific situation. So many men from your generation came back from the war feeling like they didn't deserve to survive, or with terrible—"

"Shellshock. I know. It was either fall, die, or come home to become an asshole who drank a fifth of whiskey a night and beat his wife for breathing. I get that." Bucky doesn't mean to cut her off, but he's starting to become agitated and he doesn't want to end up with a handful of pills to _calm him down_ again. He's had enough drugs to keep him docile and _manageable_ for three lifetimes. "I'm not shellshocked. I know there was something wrong with me."

"Bucky—"

"I know what Dr Erskine said about his serum. Steve told me a couple days after he turned up looking like some kind of myth." The doctor's words have haunted him ever since, because even in those early days after captivity ( _puking up bright blue bile away from the camp where nobody could see him as they trudged back to safety on that long trek through Austria trying to be normal when he could hear everything and smell everything and food make him sick because he could taste every molecule of mould and shit on it_ ), Bucky had known what'd been done to him couldn't be undone with a few weeks of bedrest and decent food. "Good becomes great, bad becomes worse."

"So you think you were bad to begin with? Because HYDRA took you back and brainwashed you?"

"I _must have been_." He digs his fingernail into the side of his thumb hard enough to bring him back to Earth, and he can see the alarm in Dr Khan's eyes as tacky blood pools in the fragile grooves of his rough skin. "If they'd taken Steve then the Winter Soldier wouldn't have been possible, do you understand? The only reason they could break me is because I was already broken."

 

_"Sergeant Barnes."_

_The words are familiar, he thinks, but the accent is different. Not his. He does still have a voice, he's fairly sure of that, even if he can't remember using it right now._

_It's cold. Maybe if he stays quiet and still then he'll be allowed a blanket._

_"I have some questions for you regarding a mission you undertook in Bavaria some time ago."_

_He feels, rather than hears, the electric crackle of the stun baton start up. They haven't told him why they're so committed to using electricity to subdue him. Maybe it has something to do with the weird metal prosthesis they made him wear over his stump arm for a few days until they seemed displeased with it and took it away again._

_"You would do well to be honest, Sergeant. Or things will become uncomfortable."_

"Are you broken now, Bucky?" The doctor always surprises him with her ability to roll with the punches, and it makes Bucky feel less guilty about bleeding all over her when he could just keep his mouth shut and handle this himself ( _because that's gone well so far_ , he hears Steve's snarky voice in the back of his mind, familiar as breathing).

"Of course I'm broken. Why the fuck d'you think I'm here?" Harsher than he means to be, again, and Bucky is starting to feel totally separated from himself today. This isn't the softness he's been trying to embrace, or the blankness he's been attempting to manage. This is something else, this is anger.

For the first time in a while, he wishes for the blank nothingness of the Asset. It would be easier if he could just—

"I think you see yourself as broken, and I think that's part of the problem." Despite the fact that Bucky can see her finger move surreptitiously to the panic button placed discretely on the bottom of her notepad, Dr Khan sounds as level-headed as ever. "You seem to see the Soldier and your pre-war self and you now as completely different beings, as if they're different people who happen to inhabit the same body."

"That's… That's not what I'm talking about." His hand is shaking hard now, and Bucky shoves it under his thigh to try and hide the display of weakness. "I'm saying there was something wrong with me before HYDRA ever happened."

"No, you're taking what Dr Erskine said to Steve and thinking it's relevant to your situation. It's not." She pauses, noting his anxious tells and considering whether to stop the session before she continues. "There are thousands of factors that fed into every situation you've told me about. Maybe you were naturally good with a rifle. Maybe you had some genetic mutation that let you survive your captivity. Maybe HYDRA tried a hundred ways of brainwashing you before they found one that stuck."

She leans forward in her chair, something she doesn't usually do with Bucky, and it forces him to pay attention to the words coming out of her mouth.

"You are here because of strange coincidences and random circumstances, and there's nothing inside you that made you be magically chosen for what was done to you." She makes eye contact, which Bucky tentatively holds even though he's feeling extremely uncomfortable with this entire session. "You ended up here because of bad luck, Bucky. You didn't ask for this and you didn't cause it. This is something that other people did to _you_ , not the Soldier and not the Bucky Barnes you used to be, but the person you are now."

"I…"

"It's easier for you to think of the Soldier as a different person, I know it is. But he was you when you were forced to do the bidding of others. Until you realise that part of you will always be the Winter Soldier, then you're not going to be able to fully process what happened to you and move past it. Nothing evil inside you made you the Soldier, Bucky, people did."

Dr Khan probably has more to say, but she doesn't get the chance. It's not Bucky who rises from the couch with purposeful grace, he left the building a few sentences ago, but the Asset. Maybe there's some truth to what the doctor is saying after all, because instead of killing her the Asset shoves her aside and slams her panic button before sliding to the floor to wait for the inevitable appearance of security and enough tranquilisers to subdue even a super-soldier.

It's done talking. The Asset… Bucky is. Whoever the fuck he is, he's done.

 

_"You're just one big streak of bad luck, aren't you?"_

_The Commander is talking. The Asset knows it should respond, but the pain from its shattered femur is inhibiting its programming. It wants to go home, even if it has no idea where home is. It doesn't have a mother, but it wants one._

_"Couldn't even make the fuckin' shot before you fell off a fuckin' mountain. Twice in one lifetime, huh? I swear to god if I get written up for this I'm gonna…"_

_The Commander's rough words fade away to white. Icy cold and the whistle of wind though unprotected ears because he hadn't liked having things around his head or neck after the first time they tried to wipe him back in Austria. Steve had thought it was strange but he'd just taken the offered scarf and never pushed…_

_The Asset fades out to memories it will no longer retain when it next wakes. Of home and warmth and fear and falling._

Bucky wakes up with the taste of metal in his mouth and the soft feeling of artificial fleece against his cheek. He can smell that Steve is with him before he's even fully conscious, and it's the only thing that stops him from coming up swinging in spite of the heaviness of his drugged limbs.

"Hey." Steve strokes a thumb gently over his rough cheek, must have known he was awake before Bucky did from the change in his breathing. Bucky figures he's lying with his head in Steve's lap, probably with his safe sweater between his face and coarse denim or worn sweatpants. "You with me?"

"I think so." Bucky's not entirely sure if it rolls off his dry tongue in English, but Steve seems to understand and kisses him lightly on the forehead as he slowly blinks himself awake. "Did I hurt her?"

"No, Buck. Dr Khan's fine. She said you pushed her out of the way and called security yourself." There's a note of sadness in his voice that Steve can't hide from Bucky, never could, and Bucky feels like he's a wrung out dishcloth. He's given for more than seventy years, he's not sure how much more he can give. "How are you feeling?"

"Tired."

_Like my whole theory of being born bad is shot to shit. Like the randomness of the universe is a lot fucking worse than deserving what happened to me. Like I'm always going to be part-Asset and I don't want to be. Like I can never escape what happened to me because it's part of me and I'm too tired to run away from myself anymore._

"Can we talk about it later?" Bucky croaks out, letting Steve help him into a sitting position and bring a cup of water to his lips. He's in his own bedroom, he realises belatedly, with his soft pink sweater over Steve's knees and his stuffed bear placed carefully within arm's reach. They must have carried him out of the therapist's office unconscious, he has no memory of getting here.

"What happened?" Steve asks quietly, concerned enough to ignore the request for the moment. "You like Dr Khan, you haven't had an episode for a long time with her."

"I… I didn't like what we were talking about." It takes a minute for Bucky to look Steve in the face, and even then he can't make himself meet his eyes. Steve is the sun and Bucky is everything on the dark side of the moon that should never rightly see the light. "D'you think I'm bad?"

"Bad? No, Buck, you're not bad." Steve looks confused, worried even, and Bucky can't tell if that's reassuring or not. "You—"

"And before, was he bad? Your friend?" He's slipping towards unconsciousness again, he can feel the drag downwards in his limbs and the pull towards the dark, safe places in his mind, but Bucky fights to stay awake because he needs to know. "Before the war."

"No, he wasn't." There's a kind of resignation in Steve's answer, like he understands what it's like to think about himself as being two different people pre-war and post-war. "He was a good man, and the war never changed that. It made him harder, made him haunted, but it didn't change who he was. Not on the inside. He was good on the inside, even if he'd never let me tell him that."

Bucky wants to ask more, wants to pick Steve's brain and pull apart who Bucky Barnes used to be so he can find the hidden virus that made him HYDRA material. Or maybe he's looking for absolution, maybe he's looking to pick through the web of what should have been and find that there's nothing, that Dr Khan is right and it's really just bad luck that left him lying here a century after he was supposed to die.

Bad luck or bad blood, who knows. Bucky's suddenly too tired to keep asking.

He slips into unconsciousness in Steve's arms, drifting into the blankness he's been waiting for.

 

_"You think fate exists?"_

_It's a pretty existential question for a teenager, that's probably true. But Steve's nearly died three times this year and Bucky needs some kind of reassurance that his best friend isn't going to keel over the next time he doesn't show up for school._

_"Ma says it's God's will when stuff happens." Steve shrugs, voice stuffed and phlegmy from his most recent bout with illness. "Maybe that's fate."_

_"Nah. Can't be. God ain't cruel." Bucky mutters, flicking through the book he'd been reading aloud because Steve's eyes were tired after a day of reading in dim light of his sick bed._

_He believes it when he says it, too. That the things that happen to them can't be God's will, because no just god would keep making Steve so sick he almost dies and then bringing him back right at the last second. The guy's had the last rites six times already, no god would be that cruel to someone who's so important. To Bucky, if not to anyone else._

_The first time he makes it across the ocean and ends up in a foxhole, Bucky starts to rethink his opinions on fate and whether God wants him to die horribly or not. Maybe it's entertaining for the almighty._

_By the time he's strapped to a table with a saw coming at what's left of his arm, he's not sure there's a god watching. Whatever's looking over him, at least now Bucky knows it's cruel._

_He doesn't have any more questions._

 


End file.
